Promotional Information

For more than forty years, the United States has reached out to
China, helping it develop a booming economy and take its place on
the world stage, in the belief that there is little to fear and
everything to gain from China's rise. But what if the Chinese have
had a different plan all along?

About the Author

Michael Pillsbury is the director of the Center on Chinese
Strategy at the Hudson Institute and has served in presidential
administrations from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Educated at
Stanford and Columbia Universities, he is a former analyst at the
RAND Corporation and research fellow at Harvard and has served in
senior positions in the Defense Department and on the staff of four
U.S. Senate committees. He is a member of the Council on Foreign
Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He
lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

#1 National Bestseller

"China's ambition to become the world's dominant power has been
there all along, virtually burned into the country's cultural DNA
and hiding, as [Pillsbury] says, in plain sight... The author is
correct to assert that China constitutes, by far, the biggest
national challenge to America's position in the world
today."--The Wall Street Journal"Provocative.... detailed and
rigorous. [Pillsbury is] right that for Washington, assessing the
nature of China's ambition, and responding to it effectively, may
be the central foreign policy challenge of our
time."--Newsweek"Pungently written and rich in detail, this
book deserves to enter the mainstream of
debate over the future of U.S. Chinese relations."--Foreign
Affairs"The Hundred-Year Marathon looks at the critical issues
of who is in fact making policy in the Chinese capital and, as a
result, it will be read, analyzed and debated for years. Think of
Pillsbury as our time's Paul Revere."--Gordon Chang, The
National Interest"This is a highly engaging and thought-provoking
read. It does what few books do well, and that is to mix
scholarship, policy, and memoir-style writing in an accessible but
still intellectually rich fashion. . . . Pillsbury . . . draw[s] on
his extensive knowledge of Chinese historical military writings and
theory as well as his interactions with Chinese defectors and
senior military officers to develop a compelling analytical defense
of this thesis. . . . In the end, whether you agree with Pillsbury
or not, the book is well worth a careful read."--Elizabeth Economy,
Council on Foreign Relations"Despite dealing with a weighty
subject, Pillsbury says everything that he wants to say . . . [in]
this highly readable book. It deserves to be widely read and
debated."--The Christian Science Monitor"Pillsbury's
scholarship is buttressed by an eye-popping amount of declassified
material.... Pillsbury's key claim [is] that China... is
methodically undertaking a 'hundred-year marathon' strategy to
displace the United States as the global hegemon... The time is
ripe to examine the trajectory of American relations with the
world's second-largest economy [and] the marathon is hardly
over."--The Weekly Standard "Following the Communist victory
in the Chinese civil war, Americans agonized over 'Who lost China?'
If we do not recognize the Chinese party-state for the predatory
animal that it is, in 20 years the question we will be asking
ourselves is 'Who lost the world?' The answer will be, 'We
did.'"--The Washington Times"A presentation of China's hidden
agenda grounded in the author's longtime work at the U.S. Defense
Department.... Fodder for concerned thought."--Kirkus
Reviews"This is without question the most important book written
about Chinese strategy and foreign policy in years. Michael
Pillsbury has spent more than four decades for the Pentagon and the
CIA talking to and learning from a core of Chinese 'hard-liners'
who may be the driving force behind Chinese foreign policy today
under Xi Jinping. Based on meticulous scholarship and written in
lively, engaging prose, this book offers a sobering corrective to
what has long been the dominant, soothing narrative of
Sino-American cooperation."--Robert Kagan, author of The World
America Made and Of Paradise and Power"A provocative
exploration of the historical sources of China's grand strategy to
become #1."--Graham Allison, Director of Harvard Kennedy School's
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs"Michael
Pillsbury has been meeting with, talking to, and studying the
'hawks' in China's military and intelligence apparatus for more
than four decades, since back when America and China were
cooperating against the Soviet Union. In this fascinating,
provocative new book, he lays out the hawks' views about the United
States and their long-term strategies for overcoming American power
by the middle of this century. In the process, the book challenges
the wrong-headed assumptions in Washington about a gradually
reforming China. Given the direction China has been taking in the
past few years, Pillsbury's book takes on immediate
relevance."--James Mann, author of About Face: A History of
America's Curious Relationship with China, The China Fantasy, and
Beijing Jeep"The Hundred-Year Marathon is based on work that
Michael Pillsbury did for the CIA that landed him the Director's
Exceptional Performance Award. It is a fascinating chronicle of his
odyssey from the ranks of the 'panda-huggers' to a principled,
highly informed, and lonely stance alerting us to China's long-term
strategy of achieving dominance. He shows that we face a clever,
entrenched, and ambitious potential enemy, suffused with the
shrewdness of Sun Tzu conducting a determined search for the best
way to sever our Achilles' heel. We have vital work to do,
urgently."--R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central
Intelligence and chairman of the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies